In the San Francisco Chronicle: Kenneth Baker’s stellar review of Splendid Grief, Darren Waterston‘s Victorian-style mourning parlor at Stanford’s Cantor Center. When he’s in his zone, Baker is one of the best in the biz.
Placing his own plainly anachronistic oil paintings in this environment must have given Waterston pause. For years, his paintings have evoked something of the strange unease that comes of recognizing oneself as a conscious organism. The setting of Splendid Grief heightens the paintings’ reminiscence of the Victorian vogue for seances and belief in the individual’s spirit as “ectoplasm” that might extrude itself from the body and even survive it.
Helen Lessick’s first Texas exhibition consists mostly of barely altered mass-produced objects — metal buckets with holes drilled in them, a couple of words embossed on a mirror, store-bought fans with ribbons attached.
The alterations seemed designed to bring poetry out of the objects with as gentle a nudge as possible.
Speaking of Texas, here’s a review plucked not at random from the essential arts catalog known as Glasstire: Ben Judson’s Six Years Later at Unit B.
The focus on objects and materials that are generally not valued for their aesthetic qualities allows Lapthisophon to draw viewers into a relationship with the poetry of the everyday, but also to consider the impact of conceptual art and criticism on mainstream aesthetics. The page from Six Years simultaneously serves as an echo of the title of the show, a kind of wall text and a chunk of raw material like the bricks and lumber.
Also from Glasstire, I’m excessively fond of Roy Neinast’s comparison of Francis Bacon’s painting with, well, bacon.
While on the subject of food, I’ve always thought Thomas Moran’s mountains looked like slabs of well-marbled beef.
In the New York Times: Holland Cotter calls William Powhida awesome, and Roberta Smith had this to say about Sophie Calle’s conceptually-rigorous unpacking of her latest in failed romance (both reviews here):
Sophie Calle’s “Take Care of Yourself” is an operatic monument to late Conceptualism, a full-throated demonstration of its means and effects. It mixes multiple mediums: photography, video, film, performance, music, dance and, above all, language, spoken, written, sung, delivered in a range of voices, styles and fonts. It combines appropriation, collaboration, randomness within a strict framework, quite a bit of real life, several forms of theory (including feminist) and no small amount of narcissism.
I wonder who’s foolish enough to date Ms. Calle. Don’t they know when the end comes she’ll reveal all (and I mean all) in installations that will receive world-wide notice?
What she did to ex-husband Greg Shepard here. I met him once, have no friends in common yet know him to be a lying, cheating self-mutilator. For the opening of the exhibit that exposed these traits, he was at her side and shaking hands with her fans. I tried not to look for bite marks.
In The Stranger: Jen Graves takes a look at a public art failure and promises a series on the theme.
What’s the latest art movement in Seattle? Public art. What? Yes. Seriously. For the last few decades, public art has been mostly thought of as a haven for losers, the place where artists go to die (or to hide). It’s not just that good public art has been the exception, it’s that good artists, with few exceptions, have avoided public art, preferring the freedom of their studios to the compromises of government work. But now, Seattle’s established and reputable studio artists–Dan Webb, Cris Bruch, SuttonBeresCuller, Lead Pencil Studio, Susie Lee, Kristen Ramirez, Leo Berk, et al.–are signing up in droves to make major public installations. Will public art kill this new generation of artists? Or can these artists save public art?
My piece on the event that motivated her response here. More to come from both of us. As a first rattle out of the box, I’ll say her denunciation of public artists who haven’t made her exceedingly small A team is excessive. But if that’s what it takes to stir the pot, then I’m for it.
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